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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • That just goes with a territory of having an iPhone. When you bought that device you signed on to a culture of consumption that is enforced by the developer of that device.

    The developer can’t force Apple to let the developer give it to you for free. Apple doesn’t tolerate free very well and anything that is free on Apple is likely either a privacy nightmare or is paid for by some subscription you have with Apple.

    This isn’t a problem with the app It’s a problem with the Apple.









  • There’s a good book from a former Smithsonian curator called One Good turn that talks about the ancient history of the screwdriver and the screw.

    If you went back in time far enough that the people around you didn’t know about the screwdriver and the screw, Even a rudimentary knowledge of It’s existence would possibly on its own break the timeline.





  • I’m a straight man from the middle of nowhere, and reading this sounds to me like we have not made any progress in accepting the variety of ways that humans develop or accepting the need to make space in society for everyone to feel like there is no need to hide. It really does seem like we are, at least in some ways, going backwards.

    When I was 12 years old I saw a documentary on the Discovery channel about klinefelter’s syndrome. The program was 45 minutes long but it briefly touched on various ways that the “third gender” had been expressed and incorporated into cultures around the world.

    In this simple program from before the conversation about gender and sexual identity became a political cudgel to dehumanize a growing number of social groups, they didn’t discuss the politics at all. It was just the science.

    It wasn’t controversial for '90’s era documentaries to simply acknowledge that the brain is just a part of the body like any other organ and can experience the same if not more variation that all of the other organs do.

    Instead, the program seemed hopeful about this burgeoning new science of the mind and its ability to help us illuminate something we have known about for eons.

    10 years later I read an MIT magazine article that reference brain scans of different people trying to identify gender identity versus sexual identity. They didn’t have a whole lot of conclusions but they found seven different clusters of data in the gender identity tests.

    That seems to me a pretty strong indication that nature has at least a few varieties of human beyond man and woman, and although the science is encouraging…

    It really shouldn’t require proof of anything to inspire people to want to be kind to each other. I don’t know that science can solve this, so maybe we have to find the faith and the hope to help it along.


  • I completely agree that she should be using chartered resources. That alone dramatically reduces the amount of selfish waste involved in her jet setting.

    If her presence in a public airport would cause a riot, then it seems like the law and security are ill-prepared to deal with her presence. That seems to indicate that she has inadequate security AND that law enforcement is not handling the crowd with the same sincerity they would any other kind of riot.

    I think the disconnect between you and me comes from what we think the most important issues here are. I think in your estimation she is a security risk to the public in the form of ‘potentially inspiring a riot’ and that justifies (or even obligates) her use of private plane travel. Where in my estimation there is no ethical or moral use case for a publicly subsidized luxury not available to the public.

    I think she’s morally obligated to opt out of a system that is immoral to begin with. I think she’s ethically required to speak out as an activist against this kind of luxury being publicly funded. I think she should be going out of her way to make sure that all of the public expense associated with her lifestyle is offset by her directly.

    I don’t really think we disagree I think we just have different things that we think are important sources of criticism.


  • I think I made it pretty clear that if she’s willing to pay the actual cost of her transportation then we would all have fewer reasons to resent her behavior.

    Flying private jets is exclusively the purview of people wealthy enough to value their time more than yours. There’s no moral or ethical way to use that infrastructure as long as it’s being publicly funded by people who can’t afford to go to the fucking doctor.

    The right thing for her to do is opt out.
    Because she is so wealthy, because she is so famous, because she is so influential, she has a greater obligation to actually find some fucking convictions and stick by them.

    If her traveling around makes people unsafe then maybe she should stay put. That’s what any other regular person would have to do. It wouldn’t be fair, but it would be what they had to do because the system is not going to bend over backwards to accommodate them.

    Taylor Swift is not special.


  • It currently is. It’s currently publicly funded. That’s how private jet flights work.

    That’s the entire context of all of my comments. It’s why the majority of the words in my comments here have been on the specific subject of the public expense attached to private jet ownership and infrastructure.

    Her private jet costs taxpayers, most of whom can’t pay their own bills without government assistance, tremendous amounts of money.

    It is reasonable for people to resent her, a billionaire, for allowing the public to pick up the tab for her outlandishly luxuriant lifestyle.

    Just like when people did this to Elon Musk, tracking private jet flights is a piece of accountability. There’s nothing wrong with tracking their flights, and there is definitely something wrong with them trying to use the their money to force the legal system to silence people who are tracking their flights.


  • Yeah I’m not really sure what your point is in all of this. It’s entirely reasonable to resent publicly funding this private luxury.

    Maybe we publicly should not be subsidizing the private jet industry, private jet infrastructure, and teeny tiny little airports for ultra wealthy people.

    If she wants to fly private then she has to accept what goes along with that. It is a very inefficient, environmentally harmful, selfish way to travel. Private jet flights are another great example of wealthy people leaching off the public.


  • I think her getting mobbed is not my problem.

    She’s rich enough that she can afford private security. She’s a private citizen who can decide where she goes and where she does not go.

    Nothing about anything you’ve described justifies stripping other people of their rights.

    If she’s being assaulted in public, that’s an actual crime, and she should invoke the legal system then.

    The legal system does not entitle her to silence people sharing publicly available information. The person who shared the movement of her private jet is not to blame for her lack of security when she gets where she’s going. No one’s mobbing her on the tarmac, no one’s crowding into the airport past security without a ticket.

    She is not special. She’s just an American, she’s entitled to absolutely nothing extra. Her attempt to use the law as a weapon of intimidation simply because she has money to push it around is exactly why she deserves negative attention right now.